The Acer Chromebook 14 is a powerful rock star with its stylish 100% metal chassis and immersive Full HD IPS display that delivers an epic mobile experience that’s unrivaled by other Chromebooks on the big stage. The incredibly fast wireless connection and amazing battery life give you all day to run your favorite Google apps or access your photos, videos, music and documents. The fast and smart Chromebook 14 delivers amazing value that’s worthy of endless encores.

April 30, 2016
Style: Silver Chromebook
For Chromebook fans, one persistent nagging issue has been the generally under-powered hardware for users who really push their machines – once you have a dozen or so tabs open with a half dozen extensions, many Chromebooks can start to slow down noticeably. Until now, the only option available has been the $1000 Pixel which is a beautiful PC but way beyond the budget for this kind of device.

Acer has identified the Chromebook market gaps and solved almost everything in this extremely solid offering – a thin, metal, almost Mac-like build, armed with 4GB of RAM, a full 14″ HD display and a Quad-core CPU. Even the touchpad and keyboard perform as well as the very best Chromebooks currently available (which, until now, I would have said were built by Dell and Samsung). The performance never lags, it meets the 10-12 hour battery life promise in my usage tests, and it’s quickly become my go-to computer for both home and work.

If you’re new to Chromebooks, here’s what to expect from this Acer machine and the O.S. generally – these are genuinely ‘instant-on’ machines, highly secure and tightly integrated into Google’s suite of apps and tools. Anything that runs in a Chrome browser on a desktop or laptop will run on a Chromebook, and there are novel app-like extensions for almost anything else (calculator apps, command lines, etc.) For an office, you can give everyone a Chromebook and their environment becomes available on login and disappears when they sign-out, and the machines can also be remotely managed if you’re a Google Apps customer.

For home users, these cheap machines fit many use cases from casual browsing and two-screening, to watching videos and calling family. They’re ideal for elderly parents and in-laws who might other spam their own machines with malware since Chromebooks are much harder to break than a Windows 7/8/10 PC. For students and road warriors, the extended battery life and automatic cloud integration makes sync-ing a breeze, especially if you hotspot from your phone. And as with many other Chromebooks, this Acer also comes with some additional freebies such as 100GB of Drive space, Google Music and a dozen in-air Gogo passes (worth over $100 alone).

As a 5-year Chromebook veteran, I’ve been waiting for this machine. It takes the basic premise of the simplicity and security of the Chrome O.S and matches it with high quality hardware at a value price. From the camera and audio quality through to the build styling, every aspect of this PC has been meticulously considered and it represents the best Chromebook that has been delivered to date
————————————————————————————
ByNicholas Sardoon September 25, 2016
Style: Gold Chromebook|Verified Purchase
I’m a Software Engineer, and wanted a relatively cheap laptop that I could take with me, and at the same time, not have to worry about like I do with my $2000+ Mac Pro book. I do a lot of development in the cloud, and make use of a lot of resources on the net, and so reasoned I didn’t need to cart around a regular laptop. Since I obviously do a lot of typing, I hoped for decent keyboard– and was pleasantly surprised. The keyboard on this unit is actually quite nice. And let’s be real. The majority of things we do everyday on a computer is covered by a Chromebook, and it’s large array of available apps and extensions (to Chrome). Certainly for specialized uses, we can’t completely untether ourselves from a full on laptop or desktop running Linux, OS X, or Windows. But Chromebooks do fill a niche.

I just received delivery of this, and set it up. One thing I didn’t like about Chromebooks that I’ve looked at in the past was their cheesy shells and keyboards, and the cost of a decent one. This unit not only has a nice aluminum shell (which is very attractive), but it also has a decent keyboard, with much better tactile properties than any Chromebooks I’ve looked at in the past. It actually looks and feels like a laptop, instead of some plastic toy.

The hardware specs on this are very nice compared to other offerings: 4G Ram, 32G storage, Quad-core processor, etc. The screen is beautiful, and the speakers are very nice. Better in fact than some of my laptops. The mouse area is responsive, and has a nice feel to it. The overall unit has a slim profile, and is light weight.

When I was comparing this model against other manufacturer’s / model’s, the only thing that made me pause was the lack of a card reader/writer. Ultimately, what I decided was that: (a) with google drive, microsoft drive, box, dropbox, etc., there is no good reason to require a reader/writer, as I can simply save and download whatever I want from the cloud, and (b) 32GB is plenty of local storage for a Chromebook.